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“He’s back, isn’t he?” she asked. “Who’s back?” he asked. “The Raven’s Landing Dismemberer!” she wailed.
After everything they went through together, she would never lie to him.
And now, in the pause, he can hear something new. Not screaming—it’s somehow worse. It’s a low laugh, a man’s sinister laugh, and he knows just where it’s coming from.
With Ezra, she could tell when he started liking her by the slight melt in his expression, so subtle someone less talented at face-reading would have missed it.
the bond they share is one that can never be destroyed. It’s like the shadow version of having a baby with someone—they took a life together. Their glue is permanent.
No matter what Olivia does in life, no matter how far she runs or whether she reinvents herself as Matilda Shelley, no matter how clever she is and what she gets away with, she will never have this. This life will never be accessible to her. She’s only a tourist.
I was writing the book that was going to exonerate us. The sheriff is dead, the dead can’t defend themselves, and everyone with half a brain knows he killed four of those women. Penny was one more name on the victim list.”
“And I’m pregnant,” Angela says, the word cutting through the silence like a sword.
Ha! I totally called it!
Maybe if Eliza follows in her footsteps and becomes the next princess of their small town, her mom won’t just love her out of obligation, but like her.
Olivia slowly took over Eliza’s life. She ate away at her family like a disease, sucking up to her dad, milking her mother for favors, and turning her brother into a lovestruck sleepwalker.
If there’s a comfort somewhere, it’s that there’s no favoritism when it comes to her mom’s emotional neglect. She and Ezra are equally ignored.
“Mom,” he says with a gush of relief, turning to her as if he just noticed she came into the room. And then, twisting his face, welling up, he wails softly, “Mommy.”
Oh my god this about broke my heart.
“Penny was a nurse at the Riverwood County Hospital. She worked in cardiology. Same department as your grandpa?” Eliza’s head is spinning, trying to follow. “And?” “And she died a few months after your grandpa’s mysterious death. Went walking to her car at the fairgrounds and was never seen again.” “So?” “There are some rumors in some of the forums that they were having an affair and he was going to leave his family. That his family—your mom’s family—they stood to lose everything.”
It was supposed to bring peace to her family—slaying the patriarch whose shadow they’d trembled beneath for decades. But unfortunately, from the day he died, Penny Patterson became the new, fresh thorn in her side.
“I’m going to hire a private investigator, too. Because I have a feeling whoever did this isn’t part of the lawsuit. They’re in the family.” Angela felt her face whiten, as if she might pass out, but did her best to keep a fixed expression. “Didn’t you hit him on the head with a fireplace poker?” Penny asked, with mock innocence.
Probably wasn’t the smartest thing for this woman to reveal all her cards. Like why tell that to one of the family members she already suspects are capable of murder? And of course, now she’s on the hit list too (though not like Angela needed one more reason to get rid of her )
life was inevitably about to become a nightmare. And the same feeling sweeps over her tonight, when her son, her beloved son, opens the deep freezer and, sobbing and shaking, pulls out a plastic-wrapped human head.
“There’s a human head in our freezer.” Then, in a tone as amiable as when he was announcing there was pizza, he turns to them and asks, “Why is there a human head in our freezer?”
Carson is such a sitcom dad lol
And then there’s Olivia: the calmest person in the room, absolutely unbothered. Incredible.
Angela comes and kneels near Olivia now, as if she’s about to beg for something. Instead she says, with a voice full of arsenic, “Listen to me, you little monster. I know my son. I know what he’s capable of.
You don't actually, but okay...
“Do not test me,” Angela says. “This isn’t a test,” Olivia says. “If you make me go to the police, I’ll tell them all about what you did to Penny Patterson.” Carson inhales sharply in harmony with Angela. They exchange a wide-eyed look. It’s as if someone came in and yanked all their clothes off and now they stand here naked, nothing to hide behind.
“We’re not bad people. It’s just that sometimes, in life, you come to a place where it’s you or someone else. That’s nature. That’s survival. It’s simple math. You or them. Who do you choose?” Eliza watches him with quivering eyes, dark as a midnight sky. “You choose you?” “We choose us,” he says, touching her chin. “Always. Because we are the Hunters.”
“You still hate this fucking house?” he whispers in her ear. She nods. He takes her face in his hands and says, “You ever thought about burning it all down?”
“Mom, I don’t want her to die,” Eliza said, the words getting stuck in her throat. “She put black widows in your bed,” her mom said. Eliza choked on a sob. Finally, her mother believed her. “She turned your brother into a murderer,” her mom went on. “She made your father and I accomplices. And then she tried to blackmail us. We have no choice.”
The music pumps so loud she can’t hear the screaming anymore. That’s somehow much worse than the screaming.
Yes, he’s aware the world is pressing in on him from all sides, but it’s done so before and he lived through it. It happened after he clipped the old tyrant’s brakes and sent his Mercedes straight into the Full Moon River.
Turned out it was much harder to slit a human throat than he imagined, much harder to dismember a body than he surmised, not a fun experience at all, one-star review, would not recommend.
In his side mirror, the officer dismounts his motorcycle and struts toward the car. Carson is frozen, not sure what to do. N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” is blasting—an unfortunate choice for a soundtrack at this moment—and
LOL IDK why this brought me back to that scene in the movie "Us" where the lady tries to get the Alexa type AI to call the police after she's been stabbed and instead it starts playing this song.
“Can you imagine if he’d snuck up on us five minutes from now?” “I don’t even want to picture it.”
"Don't mind us officer, just getting rid of some luggage in the river."
“Coyotes,” the officer says finally, slipping his helmet back on. “Distress signal. Gives me the willies every time I hear it out here—sounds just like a woman screaming.”
And it’s then that Eliza realizes what a fantastic actor her mother is. That she’s been secretly acting all her life.
How did Eliza Hunter, sixteen years old, who lives in a gorgeous house on a hill, who never hurt anyone intentionally in her life, end up here in a cold interrogation room with her homicidal family?
It doesn’t matter how this story ends. It doesn’t matter if her family gets arrested for murder or gets away with it. Nothing will ever be the same. All
They lock eyes. A little whisper in Eliza says, there goes my best friend.
Soon the anger courses through her, throbbing like a heartbeat all its own. Soon her own survival loses its glow. It’s not enough.
There’s been a terrible accident, says the nurse. When the girl learns she’s the sole survivor, she can’t even scream.
